For Hearing People Only Chapter 15- " Should all hearing people learn to sign?"
the main focus of this chapter is the question of whether all children should be required to learn sign? I have been thinking about this idea every since first reading this chapter (which was about a week ago). I am completely for the proposal, as the book mentions "preschoolers are at the prime age for language acquisition." I wish I would have had the opportunity to learn sign as a child. My only concern with the matter is that children are going to learn or even be taught the HOLMS of singing or fingerspelling wrong. The book mentions in this chapter the importance of a good teacher, and often preschool teachers aren't required to have anything more than a high school diploma, and I don't know about you but I did not know how to correctly fingerspell before taking this ASL course. Yes there are videos and books out there that use very effective teaching methods, but I really believe that you need some interaction with a proficient signer to learn fingerspelling well enough to teach it.
I do think that it would be great to teach young children fingerspelling, and maybe a few basic signs but not more than that. I plan to teach my (very very future) children how to fingerspell, but I want to be sure they learn to do it correctly.
Chapter 15 gave some good reasons backing up their thoughts about the importance of learning sign, one of my favorites is that it improves "hand-eye coordination and manual-dexterity skills."
One thing I learned in this chapter is that fingerspelling is not the same is Sign Language, I did not know that Fingerspelling had a different origin.
Like yourself, I too learned a lot from this chapter. I was not aware that fingerspelling had a different origin from Sign Language. I also agree that all children should at least be taught fingerspelling. I believe that in the long run knowing your alphabet in signing will become very helpful in many situations.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I think it is a great time to teach the young a new language. It will only help them. Learning other languages would be more of a leaerning process and ASL can be taught in many fun ways with young children. I also wish that I was taught to sign as a child. I feel it would have been very beneficial.
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